Senza Fili Sparring Partners

AI is power hungry. The token economy is both a necessity to allocate limited resources and monetize AI, but also imposes constraints on its adoption. What’s the solution to this?

In this Sparring Partners, Julio Gonzalez-Saenz, AI Champion at Vodafone UK, makes the case for quantum as a technology that allows us to scale the adoption of AI by reducing its computational and power requirements and limiting token-economy bottle...

We know that AI models need high-quality, reliable data to produce good outcomes. But do operators have access to the data and can share it across vendors? Do we have the standards in place to facilitate this, and are they sufficient to share data reliably?

In this episode of Sparring Partners, Paul Patras, CEO and Co-founder of NetAI and Professor of Mobile Intelligence at the University of Edinburgh, works on these issues on a da...

I have to admit: I got stumped while looking for a title. Gemini was also stumped and offered no helpful suggestions. I think this is because Chris Lewis at Lewis Insight and I took a very broad look at the current telco environment and tried to extrapolate where it is going, leveraging seven decades of combined life in telecoms, and openly talking about our hopes and our fears.

It felt like a cathartic experience, as Chr...

Small cells have come of age. They are no longer the rebellious teenager on the fringe. They have reached a more mature stage, offering multiple complementary solutions to address insufficient coverage, capacity and reliability in indoor venues and dense outdoor environments. These are the locations where the macro infrastructure is not well-suited to provide both the performance and cost efficiency we need.

In this Sparring Partne...

Clearly, we have not nailed down monetization in telecoms. After decades of double-digit CAGR, revenues have flattened or declined. 4G did not reverse the trend. 5G did not either. AI and 6G will likely be more of the same. Why is it so? And can we change it?

Faiq Khan offered an intriguing view on monetization, drawing from his work across different countries, with vendors and operators and, finally, at Rakuten, an operator with a...

AI promises higher efficiency, more automation and greater user experience. Yet it may also fail to scale or to deliver, or require more resources than it saves. How to get the good sides of AI and protect network operations from its challenges?

In this Sparring Partners, I talked with Rick Fulwiler, Senior Director Product Management at NETSCOUT, about how to make AI efficient through token reduction and how this is done primarily...

AI and quantum can strengthen network security and resilience, but can also amplify vulnerabilities and expand the scope for security attacks. We need a new approach to cybersecurity in an era of geopolitical tensions, AI and quantum, and increased reliance on telecom networks to protect us.

In this Sparring Partners, I spoke with Caroline Chappell, a fellow independent analyst and founder of CC Squared, about how a holistic approa...

In Sparring Partners, I try to track down hot topics. This episode does the opposite by exploring an issue that has quietly faded from industry awareness: CALEA and lawfulintercept. Nick Johnson, an independent telecom consultant and friend since his days at ip.access, and I discuss how attention has shifted toward encryption and privacy, perhaps too much so.

• What is happening with wiretaps now that most traffic bypasses tradi...

[This is a bonus episode sponsored by VIAVI Solutions]

As telco networks grow more complex, CSPs are under increasing pressure to turn AI from experimentation into measurable business value. AIOps has emerged as a critical foundation for autonomous networks, enabling operators to improve customer experience, reduce operational risk, and scale automation safely. 

In this executive webinar, moderated by Monica Paolini, Senza Fil...

I have devoted many Sparring Partners episodes to the AI models that live in data centers. In this one, Yue Wang, Chief Technologist at China Telecom, and I venture into the world of embodied intelligence and the shift it will create in our network infrastructure.

Drawing on Yue’s technical insights into physical AI, we explored how the need for high-capacity, low-latency, high-reliability, deterministic connectivity will sha...

Most Sparring Partners are about using AI to improve the network infrastructure. This one is about how networks enable new AI-driven applications that need connectivity to work.

I talked with Nigel Wallbridge, Director and Founder at Vivent Biosignals, on how biosensors on plants allow AI models to listen to plants to predict disease and stress, and help farmers to increase crop production and sustainability. It is a valuable appli...

Being Italian, I thought I should have one of the country-focused podcasts on Italy. But what is something that sets Italy apart? Having spent more time there recently, I quickly came up with the answer: SPID (Sistema Pubblico di Identità Digitale), the Digital ID platform that not only works well and supports many services, but that also most Italians use. Other European countries have digital ID systems too, but except for Estoni...

Money alone does not drive innovation. You need people with passion, creativity, and talent to work together. You need collaboration. And to foster it.

In this Sparring Partners, I talked with Dimitra Simeonidou, Director of the Smart Internet Lab at the University of Bristol, and Chief Scientific Advisor at the European Commission, about her work, most recently with JOINER (Joint Open Infrastructure for Network Research), a U...

My plan was to have a podcast on a 5G private network at the Rosslare Europort in Ireland. But this is not what this podcast is about. What our guest, Carl Coates, ICT Business Relationship Manager, at Irish Rail (the owner of the port), is doing at Rosslare is much broader, more ambitious and inspiring. It is more than a 5G mobile private network: it is a connectivity and sustainability project that is changing how people work, ho...

We are ready to move beyond the traditional approach that treats antennas as passive, set-and-forget transducers. Until now, this lack of visibility has left operators unable to fine-tune or optimize the radiation layer, especially in real time. Digital antennas provide the visibility and control necessary to make the antenna an integral part of a closed-loop, AI-driven RAN.

In this Sparring Partners, I talk with Aleksis Anterow, C...

What should we keep in the cloud and in the edge? Computationally intensive functionality will remain in the cloud, but more is shifting to the edge, driven by the higher efficiency of edge solutions and the need to keep more data and processing locally.

In this Sparring Partners, I talked to Manish Singh, Telecom Systems Business at Dell, about his perspective and vision for the edge, as the role and requirements of the edge evolv...

We have done it again! At the end of MWC, Sean Kinney Editor-in-Chief at RCR Wireless and I sat down to compare notes on what we had heard and seen at MWC, skipping announcements and keynotes, and reflecting on what we had seen and heard out of the limelight.

AI moving from demos into ops, the promise and pain of AI‑RAN, the evolution of open RAN, 6G, sensing, drones, and the industry's more realistic mood and expectations after th...

Thousands of protesters were killed in Iran, and the world's attention moved on within days. It is a massive ethical failure, but hardly an isolated example of how social media is driving a culture of polarization, outrage, and misinformation. AI and pervasive connectivity amplify these trends, challenging the very survival of democracy, cohesion, and tolerance.

Siavash Alamouti, Cofounder at mimik and a Marconi Fellow, is back on ...

In this second Sparring Partners with Philippe Ensarguet, VP Software Engineering and Orange Fellow at Orange, we talked about how human can remain relevant when AI is much better than us at crunching data, finding answers and running networks. Networks will change, but we have to change too. By 2030, human experts will no longer be knowledge providers and sense makers. They will have to learn to act as a wisdom compass.

We will al...